DESERT DANCER (Richard Raymond). 104 minutes. Opens Friday (April 17). For venues and times, see Movies. Rating: NN
Where to watch: iTunes
It’s a little strange to see a movie like Desert Dancer opening in April. Generally, distributors hold their naked Oscar bait until the fall, the better to stage a splashy TIFF debut. Maybe someone just knew better this time.
Richard Raymond‘s wobbly drama takes the true story of Afshin Ghaffarian, who pushed back against Iran’s fundamentalist power structure by forming a secret dance company at his Tehran university, and turns it into a pandering underdog narrative with lashings of political tension: Footloose by way of Rosewater.
Raymond and screenwriter Jon Croker boil every story point down to the most simplistic interpretation possible, with characters declaring the importance of their rebellious acts at every opportunity – because this is a very serious movie! – at least until the next rehearsal montage.
Reece Ritchie is appropriately impassioned as Ghaffarian, though the movie struggles with a subplot that finds our one-note hero mooning over a fellow dancer (Freida Pinto) whose talent is compromised by past trauma and current drug addiction.
This might all be factually accurate, but despite that fact that Pinto is such a vital performer, her character’s backstory is handled so clumsily that it feels like one more cliché thrown onto the pile.
